Monday, September 30, 2013

I among others have found it peculiar that as fine a
publication as The Economist could be
an Obama supporter.

Yet, the magazine is not run by a band of ideological zealots so
it still reveres fact. Having resisted the lure to
become an entertainment vehicle, it still provides solid information. As Time and Newsweek pass into the dustbin of history, The Economist is thriving.

Case in point, a new story explains that the Islamic
terrorism that Barack Obama said was on the path to defeat is on the march. I among others have pointed to the fact, so it’s good to have a reputable publication telling us how it is:

A FEW
months ago Barack Obama declared that al-Qaeda was “on the path to defeat”. Its
surviving members, he said, were more concerned for their own safety than with
plotting attacks on the West. Terrorist attacks of the future, he claimed,
would resemble those of the 1990s—local rather than transnational and focused
on “soft targets”. His overall message was that it was time to start winding
down George Bush’s war against global terrorism.

Mr
Obama might argue that the assault on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi by
al-Qaeda’s Somali affiliate, the Shabab, was just the kind of thing he was
talking about: lethal, shocking, but a long way from the United States. Yet the
inconvenient truth is that, in the past 18 months, despite the relentless
pummelling it has received and the defeats it has suffered, al-Qaeda and its jihadist
allies have staged an extraordinary comeback. The terrorist network now holds
sway over more territory and is recruiting more fighters than at any time in
its 25-year history (see article). Mr Obama must reconsider.

Drone attacks had seriously damaged al Qaeda’s central
leadership. The Somali branch called al Shabab was on the ropes. Al Qaeda in
the Arabian peninsula was in trouble.

No more.

The
Economist reports:

The
Shabab is recruiting more foreign fighters than ever (some of whom appear to
have been involved in the attack on the Westgate). AQAP was responsible for the
panic that led to the closure of 19 American embassies across the region and a
global travel alert in early August. Meanwhile al-Qaeda’s core, anticipating
the withdrawal of Western troops from Afghanistan after 2014, is already moving
back into the country’s wild east.

Funnily enough, for those who were heralding a new
democratic Middle East two years ago, the Arab Spring has been a godsend for
Islamic terrorists:

The
coup against a supposedly moderate Islamist elected government in Egypt has
helped restore al-Qaeda’s ideological power. Weapons have flooded out of Libya
and across the region, and the civil war in Syria has revived one of the
network’s most violent and unruly offshoots, al-Qaeda in Iraq, now grandly
renamed the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham.

One might reasonably question whether the Egyptian military’s
effort to destroy the Muslim Brotherhood represents a victory for Islamists. If
you believe that Islamic terrorism is that important a threat, you should
support any and all efforts to suppress it. If you say that efforts to suppress
it by force inflame it, you are offering a counsel of despair.

That being said, the fall of Qadhafi in Libya and the
ongoing Syrian civil war have certainly stoked the flames of Islamic terror.

Why has this happened? The
Economist answers that the fault lies with what it calls “Western
complacency,” by which it means, the foreign policy of the Obama
administration:

How
much should Western complacency be blamed for this stunning revival? Quite a
bit. Mr Obama was too eager to cut and run from Iraq. He is at risk of
repeating the mistake in Afghanistan. America has been over-reliant on drone
strikes to “decapitate” al-Qaeda groups: the previous defence secretary, Leon
Panetta, even foolishly talked of defeating the network by killing just 10-20
leaders in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. The general perception of America’s
waning appetite for engagement in the Middle East, underlined by Mr Obama’s
reluctance to support the moderate Syrian opposition in any useful way has been
damaging as well.

Apparently, American weakness is a very effective recruiting
tool for terrorists. It tells prospective jihadis that they might be on the
winning side in the war against an increasingly ineffectual America.

Is America also losing the battle of ideas? The Economist bemoans the fact that we
have failed to win over moderate Muslims. Doubtless, it is right. But perhaps
the reason is that moderate Muslims have been terrorized. Surely, they are not
immune from Islamic terrorism. They count among its most important targets.

It makes sense that rich Gulf petrostates have been more
than willing to buy off the terrorists.

They have no choice. It’s better than waiting for America to
come and save them.

Fewer and fewer people are signing up for therapy these
days, so therapists like Brandon Gaudiano are trying to understand why. After
all, the new therapies, especially the cognitive-behavioral kinds, have been
shown empirically to produce good outcomes. When it comes to depression and
anxiety they are at least as effective as medication. Why has the message not
gotten out?

It sounds like a plausible premise until Gaudiano tells us that not many therapists are using these new and effective techniques:

But
psychotherapy’s problems come as much from within as from without. Many
therapists are contributing to the problem by failing to recognize and use
evidence-based psychotherapies (and by sometimes proffering patently outlandish
ideas). There has been a disappointing reluctance among psychotherapists to
make the hard choices about which therapies are effective and which — like some
old-fashioned Freudian therapies — should be abandoned.

Why limit ourselves to Freudian therapies? How many
therapists are involved in touchy-feely work, teaching empathy and asking how
it feels to feel as you feel?

Face it, if the word feeling suddenly vanished from the
language more than half the nation’s therapists would be struck dumb.

I am confident that there are more feeling-based therapists
than there are cognitive-behavioral therapists.

Therapy has been around for quite some time now. Psychoanalysis
did lead the way but it has now been eclipsed by other forms of therapy. Unfortunately,
most of the new therapies are more fluff than substance. They seem to derive
less from scientific research than from a caring instinct.

Also, many therapists spend a lot of time handing out bad
advice. I am, of course, not against counselors who give advice. Unfortunately,
most therapy programs do not teach anyone in doing it well so most therapists,
especially the young and inexperienced do it poorly.

Nary a day passes when you do not have the chance to see a
therapist handing out insights on television. Some are real therapists; some
are the fictional equivalent.

Would anyone’s experience of watching these people persuade him to undergo therapy? How many of these TV stars are doling out anything more
than shopworn platitudes and psychobabble? How often has anyone watched one of
these therapists and come away thinking that the therapist might really understand or
help me with my problems?

By saying that it’s just an image problem Gaudiano ignores the fact that many people have had a direct experience of therapy. If they have
abandoned therapy they might be making a rational judgment based on their
own personal experience.

When Gaudiano says that the problem is image he is
disrespecting the population that has simply had enough therapy.

If therapy is declining as a profession perhaps it just the
market’s way of saying that therapists have not been doing a very good job. You
are not going to spend money to see someone who essentially is trying to mother
you. If that’s what you want you can get it for free from someone who is
probably better at it.

To avoid misunderstanding, the tendency to mother patients
is not limited to female therapists. Male therapists also indulge this
unfortunate habit. As might be expected it isn’t something that you want to
witness first hand.

It’s true that cognitive-behavioral therapies, among others,
provide a clear benefit for many patients. But, then again, so do aerobic
exercise and yoga. More and more people have come to recognize their value.They cost less than therapy and you do not have to listen to
someone say:

“How did that make you feel?”

By now, I suspect that many prospective therapy patients
would pay good money not to have to hear that again.

Sunday, September 29, 2013

America may no longer excel at educating children, but it is
surely leading the world in self-recrimination. The kids aren't learning anything, but we feel appropriately bad about it.

Joanne Lipman explains that as our children continue to lag their
peers around the world, we are gnashing our teeth and wringing our hands:

We're
in the midst of a national wave of self-recrimination over the U.S. education
system. Every day there is hand-wringing over our students falling behind the
rest of the world. Fifteen-year-olds in the U.S. trail students in 12 other
nations in science and 17 in math, bested by their counterparts not just in
Asia but in Finland, Estonia and the Netherlands, too. An entire industry of
books and consultants has grown up that capitalizes on our collective fear that
American education is inadequate and asks what American educators are doing
wrong.

… the
kinder, gentler philosophy … has dominated American education over the past few
decades. The conventional wisdom holds that teachers are supposed to tease
knowledge out of students, rather than pound it into their heads. Projects and
collaborative learning are applauded; traditional methods like lecturing and
memorization—derided as "drill and kill"—are frowned upon, dismissed
as a surefire way to suck young minds dry of creativity and motivation.

We want children to develop their creativity. We want them
to flourish. We want them to be happy and healthy. We do not want them to
struggle. We do not want them to compete. We do not much care if they ever
learn anything.

It was not just the self-esteem movement that led us to this
impasse. Of equal import was the fact that traditional methods of education
were branded as abusive.

Our culture has been overcome with a phobia about child abuse.
We saw it when Americans attacked the Tiger Mom for forcing her child to sit at
the piano until she could play a passage right.

Try to discipline a child, try to teach perseverance and you
will be lumped in with the bullies and the child molesters. At a minimum you
will be denounced as a stone cold reactionary.

The abuse charge has blinded people to the evidence. After
all, there is a mountain of evidence that shows not merely that empty praise hurts
children but that failing to discipline children damages their ability to learn:

Now I'm
not calling for abuse; I'd be the first to complain if a teacher called my kids
names. But the latest evidence backs up my modest proposal. Studies have now
shown, among other things, the benefits of moderate childhood stress; how
praise kills kids' self-esteem; and why grit is a better predictor of success
than SAT scores.

Lipman is calling for a return to the old ways, where strict
discipline and unyielding demands defined the experience of education. Not a
minute too soon. We all know that today’s young adults lack a sense of
discipline. They do not know how to persevere, so they tend to give up. They do
not think of how they can best accomplish a task. They are looking to see what
they can get away with.

We need to recognize that these character flaws were taught
to these children in school.

Teachers had all the right feelings, but Johnny and Janey
were not learning anything. In truth, teachers were so thrilled to have the right feelings that did not really notice that their children were failing to learn anything.

ipman offers a simple answer to the question of why American
children underperforming on standard math tests:

American
students struggle with complex math problems because, as research makes
abundantly clear, they lack fluency in basic addition and subtraction—and few
of them were made to memorize their times tables.

When teachers fail to force children to memorize their multiplication
tables, they are undermining these children’s ability to do future work in math.

Lipman recommends that teachers follow the example of her
old music teacher. She offers a touching and moving tribute:

I had a
teacher once who called his students "idiots" when they screwed up.
He was our orchestra conductor, a fierce Ukrainian immigrant named Jerry
Kupchynsky, and when someone played out of tune, he would stop the entire group
to yell, "Who eez deaf in first violins!?" He made us rehearse until
our fingers almost bled. He corrected our wayward hands and arms by poking at
us with a pencil.

Today,
he'd be fired. But when he died a few years ago, he was celebrated: Forty
years' worth of former students and colleagues flew back to my New Jersey
hometown from every corner of the country, old instruments in tow, to play a
concert in his memory. I was among them, toting my long-neglected viola. When
the curtain rose on our concert that day, we had formed a symphony orchestra
the size of the New York Philharmonic.

I was
stunned by the outpouring for the gruff old teacher we knew as Mr. K. But I was
equally struck by the success of his former students. Some were musicians, but
most had distinguished themselves in other fields, like law, academia and
medicine. Research tells us that there is a positive correlation between music
education and academic achievement. But that alone didn't explain the belated
surge of gratitude for a teacher who basically tortured us through adolescence.

I fear that Lipman is right. In today’s world, a teacher
like that would probably be fired. Parents expect their children to be coddled.
They expect their children to receive excellent grades, merited or not.

Were a teacher to call out children for
poor performance their parents would sue. They would demand that he
never be allowed to teach again. After all, the worst crime today is not the
failure to teach. It’s hurting a child’s delicate feelings.

Saturday, September 28, 2013

For almost as long as the self-esteem movement has been infiltrating America’s schools and homes, research has shown that it is
counterproductive.

Children who are showered with empty praise and unearned
rewards lose motivation, lose the ability to persist in the face of failure and
ultimately do worse than those who are taught a work ethic.

Children who are told that they are brilliant do less well
than do children who are praised for their effort.

The moral of the story is that the Tiger Mom was on to
something. Our self-esteemist culture despised the Tiger Mom but she was
following precepts that have been shown, by American researchers, to be far
more effective than those prescribed by the empty praise movement.

The truth has been out there for years. I recently learned
of an article that Po Bronson wrote about it in New York Magazine in 2007. My thanks to Dennis for the tip.

Bronson explained that the godfather of this
movement was someone named Nathaniel Branden:

Since
the 1969 publication of The
Psychology of Self-Esteem, in which Nathaniel Branden opined that
self-esteem was the single most important facet of a person, the belief that
one must do whatever he can to achieve positive self-esteem has become a
movement with broad societal effects. Anything potentially damaging to kids’
self-esteem was axed. Competitions were frowned upon. Soccer coaches stopped
counting goals and handed out trophies to everyone. Teachers threw out their
red pencils. Criticism was replaced with ubiquitous, even undeserved, praise.

Dr. Roy Baumeister had been a believer in the value of empty
praise. When he studied the phenomenon he concluded that he had been wrong:

Baumeister
concluded that having high self-esteem didn’t improve grades or career
achievement. It didn’t even reduce alcohol usage. And it especially did not
lower violence of any sort. (Highly aggressive, violent people happen to think
very highly of themselves, debunking the theory that people are aggressive to
make up for low self-esteem.) At the time, Baumeister was quoted as saying that
his findings were “the biggest disappointment of my career.”

The empty praise movement taught parents and teachers to lie
to children, systematically and shamelessly. Bronson reported ons what happened:

For a
few decades, it’s been noted that a large percentage of all gifted students
(those who score in the top 10 percent on aptitude tests) severely
underestimate their own abilities. Those afflicted with this lack of perceived
competence adopt lower standards for success and expect less of themselves.
They underrate the importance of effort, and they overrate how much help they
need from a parent.

When
parents praise their children’s intelligence, they believe they are providing
the solution to this problem. According to a survey conducted by Columbia
University, 85 percent of American parents think it’s important to tell their
kids that they’re smart. In and around the New York area, according to my own
(admittedly nonscientific) poll, the number is more like 100 percent. Everyone does it, habitually.
The constant praise is meant to be an angel on the shoulder, ensuring that
children do not sell their talents short.

Unfortunately, if a child’s parents tell him that he is
smart, he will start underperforming. The most important research was performed
by Prof. Carol Dweck. Bronson described it:

“When
we praise children for their intelligence,” Dweck wrote in her study summary,
“we tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart, don’t risk making
mistakes.” And that’s what the fifth-graders had done: They’d chosen to look
smart and avoid the risk of being embarrassed.

And also:

Those
praised for their effort on the first test assumed they simply hadn’t focused
hard enough on this test. “They got very involved, willing to try every
solution to the puzzles,” Dweck recalled. “Many of them remarked, unprovoked,
‘This is my favorite test.’” Not so for those praised for their smarts.
They assumed their failure was evidence that they weren’t really smart at all. “Just watching them, you could see the
strain. They were sweating and miserable.”

So, empty praise makes you dumber. A work ethic makes you
smarter.

In Bronson’s words:

Having
artificially induced a round of failure, Dweck’s researchers then gave all the
fifth-graders a final round of tests that were engineered to be as easy as the
first round. Those who had been praised for their effort significantly improved
on their first score—by about 30 percent. Those who’d been told they were smart
did worse than they had at the very beginning—by about 20 percent.

Dweck
had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the
magnitude of the effect. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they
can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their
success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control,
and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

Children who are told that they are naturally talented and
gifted conclude that they do not need to make an effort. They believe that
their innate abilities will allow them to breeze through any task. If anything
goes wrong they do not have a work ethic to allow them to soldier on:

In
follow-up interviews, Dweck discovered that those who think that innate
intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids’ reasoning
goes; I don’t need to put out
effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that
you can’t cut it on your natural gifts.

I will underscore here the potentially salutary effect of
Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule. Whatever you think of the rule, at the
very lest it tells people that, besides your talent, you cannot succeed if you
do not put in an enormous amount of effort over an extended period of time.

Short of becoming a Tiger Mom, one good way to motivate
students, the researchers found, is to tell them that the brain is a muscle.
The harder you work it the stronger it becomes.

Bronson wrote:

The
teachers—who hadn’t known which students had been assigned to which
workshop—could pick out the students who had been taught that intelligence can
be developed. They improved their study habits and grades. In a single
semester, Blackwell reversed the students’ longtime trend of decreasing math
grades.

The
only difference between the control group and the test group were two lessons,
a total of 50 minutes spent teaching not math but a single idea: that the brain
is a muscle. Giving it a harder workout makes you smarter. That alone improved
their math scores.

It should not be surprising that the more you lie to
children the less they will believe anything that you say. If you offer too
much empty praise children will eventually feel that all praise is
empty.

In Bronson’s words:

Once
children hear praise they interpret as meritless, they discount not just the
insincere praise, but sincere praise as well.

Friday, September 27, 2013

I knew it had to serve a useful purpose, but I didn’t know
what the purpose was.

Now, I have a better idea. Aside from the fact that the
annual United Nations meetings bollix up the traffic in my neighborhood, they
provide intrepid reporters a chance to interview a multitude of world leaders
without having to travel.

Peggy Noonan has risen to the challenge. What she heard on
her perambulations through Turtle Bay has not been very encouraging.

Foreign diplomats and political leaders have a decidedly
downcast view of
America. They miss the old America, the America that led the world. They
despair over the loss, both in the example America set and the leadership it
showed on the world stage.

She heard this from “the prime minister of a Western
democracy:”

"In
the past we have seen some America overreach," said the prime minister of
a Western democracy, in a conversation. "Now I think we are seeing America
underreach." He was referring not only to foreign policy but to economic
policies, to the limits America has imposed on itself. He missed its old
economic dynamism, its crazy, pioneering spirit toward wealth creation—the old
belief that every American could invent something, get it to market, make a
bundle, rise. The prime minister spoke of a great anxiety and his particular
hope. The anxiety: "The biggest risk is not political but social. Wealthy
societies with people who think wealth is a given, a birthright—they do not
understand that we are in the fight of our lives with countries and nations set
on displacing us. Wealth is earned.
It is far from being a given. It cannot be taken for granted. The recession
reminded us how quickly circumstances can change." His hope? That the
things that made America a giant—"so much entrepreneurialism and
vision"—will, in time, fully re-emerge and jolt the country from the
doldrums.

You knew that the Obama administration had been
systematically tamping down American economic dynamism. Now you know that you
were not the only one who noticed. It’s worthwhile to measure the consequences
these policies are producing around the world. They facilitate the work of
those nations who seek to displace America.

World leaders know, as you know, that wealth must be
produced. It must be earned. An administration that does not whatever is necessary
to produce wealth is immiserating itself.

Surely, the administration has caused other nations to respect us less. Our president does not stride over the globe like
a great leader; he presents himself and he is increasingly seen as a minor
figure, a small man. Other nations witness Obama’s ineptitude and see a man and
a nation diminished.

Noonan explained:

The
second takeaway of the week has to do with a continued decline in admiration
for the American president. Barack Obama's reputation
among his fellow international players has deflated, his stature almost
collapsed. In diplomatic circles, attitudes toward his leadership have been
declining for some time, but this week you could hear the disappointment, and
something more dangerous: the sense that he is no longer, perhaps, all that
relevant. Part of this is due, obviously, to his handling of the Syria crisis.
If you draw a line and it is crossed and then you dodge, deflect, disappear and
call it diplomacy, the world will notice, and not think better of you. Some of
it is connected to the historical moment America is in.

A
scorching assessment of the president as foreign-policy actor came from a
former senior U.S. diplomat, a low-key and sophisticated man who spent the week
at many U.N.-related functions. "World leaders are very negative about
Obama," he said. They are "disappointed, feeling he's not really in
charge. . . . The Western Europeans don't pay that much attention to
him anymore."

And then there was the snub heard ‘round the world.

Back in the bad old days Iran belonged to the axis of evil.
The tyrannical Islamist regime had become a pariah on the world stage.

Thanks to President Obama, such is no longer the case. Obama
decided that he wanted to do business with Iran. He reached out a hand of
friendship to Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, suggesting that they meet
during the U.N. meetings this week. The Iranian leader replied that he did not
have the time.

Noonan analyzed:

But
[Obama’s] spokesmen had suggested the possibility of a brief meeting or
handshake between Messrs. Obama and Rouhani. When that didn't happen there was
a sense the American president had been snubbed. For all the world to see.

Which,
if you are an American, is embarrassing.

While
Mr. Rouhani could not meet with the American president, he did make time for
journalists, diplomats and businessmen brought together by the Asia Society and
the Council on Foreign Relations. Early Thursday evening in a hotel ballroom,
Mr. Rouhani spoke about U.S.-Iranian relations.

Obama has not only succeeded in diminishing himself,
diminishing the nation and reducing the respect we command on the world stage.
He has managed to enhance the prestige of the president of Iran.

As that nation gets closer to building a nuclear weapon what
makes you think that anything or anyone will now be able to stop it.

In this week’s New
York Magazine the headline above Frank Rich’s essay reads: It’s Hard to Hate Rand Paul.

The subheading reads:

The junior senator from Kentucky would be an
appalling right-wing president, and yet he is a valuable politician: a man of
conviction, and a visitation from a post-Obama political future.

Let’s stipulate that writers do not always write their own
headlines. Be that as it may, New York Magazine
seems to believe that intelligent, sophisticated, deep-thinking New Yorkers need to know who to hate. They do not form their political views on policy analysis, not on deliberation, not on reflection…
but on raw hate.

And I thought it was bad to hate. Don’t we have laws against
hate crimes? What happened to civility?

Apparently, New Yorkers do not need to engage in civil
dialogue with Republicans. It suffices to hate them.

Frank Rich knows his audience. Apparently, he believes that
they are most comfortable with their political beliefs when they can hate their
opponents.

Beyond that, the Rich profile of Rand Paul is interesting
and fairly even-handed.

…after
a chaotic week of White House feints and fumbles accompanied by vamping and
vacillation among leaders in both parties, the odd duck from Kentucky emerged
as an anchor of principle, the signal amid the noise.

Naturally, Rich raises alarms about the horrors that would
befall “the majority of Americans” by a Paul presidency.

A Paul
presidency would be a misfortune for the majority of Americans who would be
devastated by his regime of minimalist government. But as we begin to imagine a
post-Obama national politics where the Democratic presidential front-runners
may be of Social Security age and the Republicans lack a presumptive leader or
a coherent path forward, he can hardly be dismissed. Nature abhors a vacuum,
and Paul doesn’t hide his ambitions to fill it.

One assumes that Rich is saying that a “majority” of
Americans depends so thoroughly on maximalist government that it would be
devastated by cutbacks on government programs.

Isn’t there something strange about the idea that a “majority”
of Americans depends on government?

For the record, and in the interest of being fair and
balanced, a large number of Americans are also suffering from the anemic Obama recovery.

IN THE
early 1980s the distressing persistence of high unemployment in Europe was
labelled “Eurosclerosis”. Some now wonder whether “Amerisclerosis” is the right
word to describe America’s labour market. It is true that unemployment has
slowly dropped from a peak of 10% in late 2009, to 7.3% at present. But this
decline overstates the health of the jobs market.

The labour-force
participation rate, the share of the working-age population either working or
looking for work, has plunged from 66% in 2007 to 63.2% in August, a 35-year
low. If those people who have simply dropped out of the labour force were
classified as unemployed, the headline jobless rate would be much higher.

This
drop in the participation rate is striking by international standards, too.
Among 34 (mainly rich-country) OECD countries, only in Ireland and Iceland did
participation rates fall farther between 2007 and 2012. In Italy and Britain,
where unemployment rates have risen by a roughly similar amount as in America,
labour-force participation rose ….

If a Republican administration produced a less than pathetic
economic recovery perhaps a “majority” of Americans would not have to rely on
government assistance.

This
leaves Paul—for the moment at least—a man with a future. If in the end he and
his ideas are too out-there to be a majority taste anytime soon, he is
nonetheless performing an invaluable service. Whatever else may come from it,
his speedy rise illuminates just how big an opening there might be for other
independent and iconoclastic politicians willing to challenge the sclerosis of
both parties in the post-Obama age.

Thursday, September 26, 2013

Countless researchers have definitively debunked the
self-esteemist ideology that has been sweeping through America’s schools and
homes.

And yet, like a preternatural blob self-esteemism continues
apace. It almost seems unkillable.

Unfortunately, this is easily explained. Those who believe
in self-esteem, who believe that children should be praised and encouraged
regardless of their achievements, do not believe in reality checks. They do not
believe that self-esteem should be accorded on the basis of facts that can be
verified objectively.

It makes sense that they apply this rule to themselves. By inflating
their own self-esteem to the point where they never fail, they can remain
impervious to the consequences of their policies.

After all, their hearts are pure. They are surely a lot purer
than yours or mine. You see, self-esteemists see themselves promoting mental
health. They believe that if they give everyone trophies, regardless of their
merit, they are producing better mental health.

After all, success feels good; failure feels bad. We do not
want anyone to feel bad because that is a sign of mental illness. Anyone who
enjoys high self-esteem will naturally flourish.

Of course, this rests on a logical fallacy. If you notice
that people who succeed have a high level of confidence then you might believe
that if you can artificially produce a high level of confidence in people who
have not succeeded they will be more likely to succeed.

But if they are old enough to know the difference between
success and failure and will end up believing that you are patronizing them.
Besides, those whose success has produced high self-esteem will cease to
strive. Why work to succeed when failure is rewarded as richly as success.

Modern psychology seems to have originated in a study of
psychopathology. It has worked to develop ways to cure injured or deranged or
traumatized psyches. It has assumed that once you remove the internal
impediments to full psychic flourishing the mind will naturally know what to
do, when to do it, how to do it, with whom to do it.

Perhaps it’s not quite the same as Plato’s idea of innate
ideas, but the theory is suggesting that the mind knows how to do this or
that innately and will accomplish all tasks successfully, if only it is healed
of its lack of confidence.

One understands that Freud himself aimed much lower. He believed
that the best he could do was to turn misery into everyday unhappiness. Yet,
his followers and most psycho professionals have happily kept open the promise
of mental health and glorious flourishing.

If they hadn’t they would have put themselves out of
business.

Seeing the psyche in terms of disease and health produced
two flaws. I will leave it to you to decide whether or not they are fatal.

By seeing human behavior as an expression of a healthy or
sick psyche the theory ignores the fact that behavior is more often a function
of experience.

To accomplish a task you need to develop a skill. Remove the
psychic impediments that are preventing you from playing golf or riding a
bicycle and you will not be one step closer to playing golf or riding a
bicycle.

In truth, what you see as a psychic impediment may simply be
a function of inexperience or inadequate instruction. One overcomes one’s fear
of bicycles by getting on a bicycle and riding it. Surely, the experience will
involve a few falls and a few scraped elbows, but, the problem cannot be solved
by convincing yourself that you are the world’s most talented cyclist when you
have never ridden a bike.

If you can be that good without getting on a bike, why
bother to get on a bike. You would have nowhere to go but down.

Second, the mental health based view of human psychology fails to
deal with questions of motivation and leadership. Knowing how to get other
people to do what is needed is one of the thorniest psychological problems.
Those who practice therapy deal with the problem all the time. In some cases
they avoid it by saying that their job is not to give advice, but this only
makes their bias more flagrant. They do not see human beings functioning society. They see them as monadic units, radical individuals.

If you are a leader how do you motivate your staff to do
their best work? Do you submit them all to sensitivity training sessions where
they learn that they are the best? Do you point out their failings and flaws,
the better to help them to overcome them? Is it better to give pep talks or to
allow people to find their own way? If it is, are there better or worse ways of
doing it?

In its own warped way the self-esteem movements has shed
some light on these questions. At the least, it shows how not to motivate children.
It has shown, clearly and definitively, that if you give everyone a trophy no
will bother to try, no one will bother to excel, no one will bother to work to
improve.

People are motivated when they compete. When they compete some
people do better than others. Some achieve more than others. Some acquire more
goods than others.

To the self-esteemists, it’s all unjust. They are opposed to
competition, whether it involves spelling bees or dodge ball. Obviously, they
have no use for the free enterprise system.

If all men and women are created equal it is unfair and
unjust for competition to give some more than others. Those who have more must have cheated, or,
more benignly, must have exerted unfair privileges.

Increasingly, we are reconstructing our nation on the
concept that success should be penalized and that failure should be rewarded.

By age
4 or 5, children aren’t fooled by all the trophies. They are surprisingly
accurate in identifying who excels and who struggles. Those who are
outperformed know it and give up, while those who do well feel cheated when
they aren’t recognized for their accomplishments. They, too, may give up.

It
turns out that, once kids have some proficiency in a task, the excitement and
uncertainty of real competition may become the activity’s very appeal.

If
children know they will automatically get an award, what is the impetus for
improvement? Why bother learning problem-solving skills, when there are never
obstacles to begin with?

In
college, those who’ve grown up receiving endless awards do the requisite work,
but don’t see the need to do it well. In the office, they still believe that
attendance is all it takes to get a promotion.

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Normally, in our society, children become adults when they
reach the age of 18.

By that time they will have acquired the right to vote, the
right to drive, the right to join the Navy, the right to get a full time job, the
right to do porn, the right to marry and the right to procreate. In many states
they will also have gained the right to consume alcoholic beverages. If they
are female, they are definitively no longer jail bait.

Now, thanks to the wonders of neuroscience, we have learned
that 25 is the new 18. In Great Britain, that is. That great nation has just
proclaimed that anyone under the age of 25 will now be considered to be a child.
An overgrown child, perhaps, but a child nonetheless. Said overgrown child will
now be consulting with a child psychologist rather than an adult psychologist.

"Neuroscience
has made these massive advances where we now don't think that things just stop
at a certain age, that actually there's evidence of brain development well into
early twenties and that actually the time at which things stop is much later
than we first thought," says [Laverne] Antrobus.

There
are three stages of adolescence - early adolescence from 12-14 years, middle
adolescence from 15-17 years and late adolescence from 18 years and over.

Neuroscience
has shown that a young person's cognitive development continues into this later
stage and that their emotional maturity, self-image and judgement will be
affected until the prefrontal cortex of the brain has fully developed.

Think of the implications.

Does this mean that we should not allow anyone to vote
before age 25? Does it mean that no one should be allowed to drink alcoholic
beverages until neuroscience declares that their prefrontal cortex has
developed fully? And what about marriage and procreation? Should anyone under
the age of 25 be allowed to marry or procreate? If their moral reasoning has
not yet fully developed does that mean that they should no longer be held
responsible for their actions?

Obviously, these are thorny questions. They are made
somewhat thornier by the fact that in the Jewish religion, boys and girls are Bar
and Bat Mitzvahed at age 13. That coming-of-age ceremony declares them to be
men and women. Should Jews modify their tradition in order to bring it into
closer accord with the latest developments from neuroscience?

In part, the problem is sematic. Should we treat adolescents
as overgrown children or young adults? Should society try to mire them in an
extended childhood or encourage them to take on adult responsibilities?

I will not venture to comment on neuroscience, but if I may
ask, does the brain develop differently for a post-adolescent if he is treated
as a large child or a young adult? Does his capacity for moral reasoning
develop more quickly if he is granted more responsibilities sooner?

I daresay that no one in the past thought that 18-year-olds
were fully functioning adults. These beings have often compensated for their
youth by learning how to take advice from those older and wiser. They were
considered to be apprentices and received guidance and encouragement. In this
way, they learned how to function as adults more quickly and more surely than
they would if they were unemployed and living with their parents.

This method only works if children are taught to respect
authority. They need to learn how to take advice from those older and wiser.
When you teach children never to trust anyone over 30 you are consigning them
to an extended adolescence.

Interviewed for the BBC article, sociologist Frank Furedi
explained that society’s expectations have changed radically. We expect very
little from adolescents and are, effectively, not disappointed.

The BBC quotes Furedi:

"Often
it's claimed it's for economic reasons, but actually it's not really for
that," says Furedi. "There is a loss of the aspiration for
independence and striking out on your own. When I went to university it would
have been a social death to have been seen with your parents, whereas now it's
the norm.

"So
you have this kind of cultural shift which basically means that adolescence
extends into your late twenties and that can hamper you in all kinds of ways,
and I think what psychology does is it inadvertently reinforces that kind of
passivity and powerlessness and immaturity and normalises that."

In the fawning, even drooling profile of Hillary Clinton
that just appeared in New York Magazine the presumptive presidential candidate
announces that she and husband Bill do a lot of hanging out together. They do
normal everyday things, just like any other couple.

Kaus quotes the description of what happened when Bill and
Hillary were both in Bogota:

Though
they spoke frequently by phone, Bill and Hillary were rarely in the same
country. By chance, their paths crossed in Bogotá, where they had dinner
together—then, owing to their massive entourages, returned to their respective hotels.
“Love conquers all except logistics,” says an aide.

Kaus comments:

I buy that explanation, don’t you? Logistics over love! Good to see New York’s
journalists strip away the veneer of BS and get to the truth of the matter. …

You do need to ask yourself why the Clintons continue to
pretend to be just another normal married couple. Are they so cynical that they take the American people to be perfect dupes?

If so, they may be right.

At the least, we now know how they have managed to stay
married through all of the turmoil.

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Gawker’s Kaity Weaver calls it the most “unhinged” article
in the New York Times “Vows” section. I cannot help but agree.

For those who don’t read it—count me among them—“Vows” is
the Times version of wedding
announcements. It does not merely announce a wedding, but it celebrates the
couple’s love. It also tries to set cultural standards for good relationships.

If you’ve just eaten, this is something you want to read
later.

Weaver explains:

Over
the weekend, the New York Times "Vows"
section published a 1,765-word celebration of one couple’s love that was
so aggressively serene—so gratingly ethereal—it just may be the most irksome in
the history of the medium.

Between
its recipe for a natural abortifacient cocktail, its emphasis on the bride’s
overwhelming beauty (“she probably doesn’t have many” bad hair days, the Times observes), and its dash of
tragic manslaughter, it's certainly staggeringly bizarre.

Perhaps Weaver does not know what an abortifacient is, but
the concoction recommended by the woman’s midwife was supposed to speed up her
contractions during delivery.

Weaver is right; the Times
article is staggering, but telling. It tells us something about how the paper
wants people to see the perfect relationship. It gives you the chance to feel
badly if your relationship or marriage does not contain the spiritual
serenity as Erika Halweil and Corey De Rosa have found.

You see, Halweil and De Rosa are yoga teachers. They live
the correct yogic life, full of serenity, oblivious to the world around them. For
a paper than tends to disparage all signs of religiosity, the Times drools over
their spirituality.

For many people the therapy culture has been replaced by the
religion of yoga.

People
describe Erika Halweil, a longtime yoga teacher in the Hamptons, as someone who
has a lot of backbone in every way. She has great posture. She rarely gets
upset over things like parking tickets or bad-hair days. (Naturally pretty, she
probably doesn’t have many.) She is sometimes stern but never shy.

The Times offers
an equally flattering description of De Rosa:

“You
always need to go a little further than you think you can in order to make
progress,” said Mr. De Rosa, who in a single conversation might discuss Hindu
deities, the connection between the knees and the ego, an energy healer he
admires, Indian spices, juice cleanses and his ideas about love (timing is
everything).

Surely, their lives have not been a bed of roses. Since Times readers definitely want to know how
they deal with trauma, the paper reports on a horrific experience.

It explains how Halweil dealt with the trauma of accidentally
running down and killing a 5 year old girl with her car:

On Aug.
17, 2008, Ms. Halweil was driving on Montauk Highway when a 5-year-old girl
rode a red toy wagon down a steep driveway and shot out onto the road in front
of Ms. Halweil’s car. When she recounts the accident (the child died and Ms.
Halweil was not charged) you can really see her calm, philosophical and open
demeanor. In an almost plaintive voice, she said: “It was clear sky, clear
road. I saw a flash of red coming toward my car.” She swerved but still hit the
wagon. “I got out of the car and this really beautiful little girl with pale
skin and blue eyes was laying in the road. Her eyes were glazed over. I knew
the spirit had left her body.”

Today,
she says the accident taught her about fate, her own and the girl’s, but at the
time she was devastated. She started taking daily classes at Tapovana and
finding comfort in Ashtanga’s rigorous, some say purifying, series of poses
that are practiced in silence. Sometimes, she stayed after class to discuss
meditation techniques or the yogic perspective on suffering with Mr. De Rosa.
He said he found her “amazingly beautiful and radiating,”

Halweil sounds as though she is drugged. She sees pale skin and blue eyes, but
she sees no blood. She can talk about vehicular manslaughter with a “calm,
philosophical and open demeanor.” Oh really, what happened to mental anguish?

Halweil talks about the little girl as though she were
talking about a doll. She has no sense of the horror of the situation. She does
not see a human body that has just been hit by a car. She has no feeling for
the pain the accident caused the child’s parents.

She says that she was devastated, but there is no sign of
it. She tried to purify her soul by taking yoga classes and talked about
suffering with De Rosa, who also had no real feeling for the loss of a child either.
Listening to Halweil express her anguish, assuming that there was some, De Rosa
found her “amazingly beautiful and radiant.”

In their world nothing makes you radiant like running down a
child. Do you think that the average individual would so easily have sloughed
off normal feelings of having participated in an act that caused a child’s
death.

Considering that the couple connected over the death of a
child, there is something jarring about this description.

As for De Rosa himself, the Times makes him into a faith
healer:

Mr. De
Rosa, who is so knowledgeable about food he can tell you what to eat to feel
more grounded, to get over a broken heart or to sleep better.

Of course, the two are perfect soul mates:

Once a
skeptic about the notion of soul mates, Mr. De Rosa said, “It was like, ‘O.K.,
this idea of true unconditional love really does exist.’ ” So, he was
asked, What is it? “It’s a combination of really loving being around each
other; perfect sexual chemistry has a lot to do with it; and openness,” he
said. “We’ve been so open about even the deepest secrets. That’s one of the
keys to really strengthening a relationship because you’re breaking barriers
and clearing blockages.”

Everybody who knows anything about human relationships knows
that it’s a bad idea to share everything. Adolescents believe in it, and they
have every right to believe in it. Adults should know better. Oversharing
causes far more pain than pleasure.

The happy couple was recently married. He wore white; she
wore a dress that she called “pigeon-blood red.”

It rankles to think of friendship as a marketplace
transaction. It rankles even more to see the giving and receiving of favors
between friends in terms of banking.

As Elizabeth Bernstein sees it, when people do favors for
their friends they are making deposits in their bank accounts. If it should
happen that the giving friend needs a favor from the receiving friend he is making
a withdrawal from his account. If the favor is not extravagant or unreasonable
the friend is morally obligated to do as requested.

Bernstein recounts the story of Christina Steinorth, a woman
who spent two decades being an exceptionally giving friend. She ran errands,
babysat and gave countless hours of free professional advice to her friend. We
will call the friend Nancy.

Being a giving person Steinorth did not expect very much in
return. She would have been right to believe that those who give in the expectation
of receiving favors in return have lesser character than those who give because
they enjoy giving.

But then, one day, she and her husband were trying to adopt
a child and she needed some letters of recommendation.

She asked Nancy. Naturally, Nancy was thrilled to have the
chance to reciprocate the many favors Steinorth had done for her over the
years. But then, Nancy did not write the letter. Steinorth asked again. Nancy
said that she would do it. She didn’t. When Nancy finally did write the letter,
the application was no longer valid.

The two women are no longer friends.

You will be thinking that Steinorth is an unusually poor
judge of character. If it took her twenty years and a crisis to discover that
Nancy was all take and no give, she does not understand friendship.

Grant that Steinorth was an exceptionally giving person.
Grant that she must have been thinking that: “it is more blessed to give then
to receive.” Still, when you give and give and give without expectation of any
return on investment, you are within your rights to ask a favor of your friend.
Besides, nothing would have prevented Nancy from offering to do a favor or two
for Steinorth over those years.

Steinorth was so generous that she blinded herself to her
friend’s character flaws. Obviously, she should not have been offering free
professional advice on an ongoing basis. She should have noticed that her
gestures of friendship were not being reciprocated and should have scaled back.

Extremes do not make the rule. They change the game.

If you give too much and pretend that you do not expect
anything in return you are not exactly making a deposit in a bank; you are producing
a situation where the other person is so totally in your debt that there is no
favor they could possible refuse you.

How many men shower women with expensive gifts in order to
put them in a position where they cannot refuse?

How many women refuse such gifts on the grounds that they do not
want to be so indebted to the gift-giver?

It should not take twenty years to figure out that a friend
is not really a friend. Bernstein explains some of the ways you can find out
sooner, rather than later, and save yourself what turns out to have been
an abusive relationship in which you were the enabler.

Bernstein writes:

When
making a new friend, pay attention early on to the other person's communal
orientation. Does he ask about you and actually pay attention to your answer?
Is she willing to do something you suggest doing, or work around your schedule?
Not everyone is capable of giving at the same level. But if you are aware of
who you are dealing with, you will be less likely to have expectations that
won't be met.

If you are sufficiently attentive, you can usually tell the
difference between someone who always talks about himself and someone who engages
in an exchange of information. You can also tell the difference between someone
who hangs on your every word but says nothing of himself and someone who talks
about himself after you talk about yourself.

You should also be aware of who offers and who does not. If
you get to the point where you have to ask, you are putting your friend in an
awkward position, because you are implying that he is not generous enough to
think of offering something himself. A true friend offers before you need to
ask.

One does not know how Steinorth asked Nancy for a letter of
recommendation, but if such a situation arises it is always better to mention
in passing that you need some letters of recommendations. A true friend will
offer to write one immediately and will discharge the task within a very short
period of time.

Someone you have to ask and to ask again is not a friend.

Friendship is a free market transaction. You need to learn
how to conduct it as a mutual exchange, seeking harmony. You should always try to avoid descending into a drama over who owes what to whom.